Through extensive research using Stewart's many previously uncollected and
unpublished letters, as well as interviews with Stewart's three children,
George expands our understanding of the life and personality of this
intrepid frontier woman....A worthy addition to strong American literature
and
history collections."  Kliatt

Given the recent literary critical attention to diaries, journals, and
letters
that add new dimensions to the record of the expansion into and settlement
of the West, George's renewal of The Woman Homesteader's life and letters
extends one's appreciation of a pioneering experience
in one Western place.  American
Literature

Stewart tells her own stories in this wonderful, very readable addition to
scholarship on the lives of frontier/homestead women; George's brief
commentaries do not intrude, but do enlighten and explain when
explanations
are needed. In her thoughtful afterword, George examines Stewart's works
in
light of their place in the
American literary canon and interprets Stewart's life as
"the personification of the unconquerable democratic spirit of the
times."  Great Plains Quarterly

In this biographical volume, George's accompanying text places the letters
in
context, provides us with a better understanding of their creation, and
describes that literary tradition in which they arose. Best of all, text
and
letters combine smoothly to tell the story of this fascinating woman and
of
the place and time in which she lived and wrote.--Nebraska History

Impertinences: Selected Writings of Elia Peattie is a collection of articles,
editorials, and narratives by Elia Peattie written during her tenure at the
Omaha World-Herald from 1888 to 1896, richly illustrated with photographs from the
period. Elia (Wilkinson) Peattie (1862-1935) was born during the Civil War and came of
age at the advent of the era of the New Woman. In many ways Peattie embodied this new
age of independence for women, writing both fiction and journalism and becoming one of
the first Plains women to write editorial columns in a major newspaper that addressed
public issues. Not shy with her opinions about current events in the state of Nebraska
in the late nineteenth century, Peattie tackled subjects such as the Wounded Knee
Massacre, capital punishment and lynchings, prostitution, the Omaha stockyards,
beet-field workers in Grand Island, schools and child rearing, the need for orphanages,
shelters for unwed mothers, charity hospitals, and the New Woman. Editor Susanne George
Bloomfield includes a biography of Peattie, who is described as "tall, dignified, and
kindly, and possessing a wicked sense of humor." Peattie's work now stands as a rare
and valuable history of Nebraska, showing us a lively frontier society through the eyes
of a woman engaged in the life of her community and her own struggle to balance her
family and career.  from the publisher

Wide-ranging and thorough research. ...
The author has made the wise decision
to iinclude exderpts of Cleary's works so we can see for ourselves what
we've been missing.  Glenda Riley

Susanne K George's absorbing account recovers the life and works of a
fascinating western American author. She vividly portrays Cleary's arduous
decade and a half on the frontier and her last, tragic years in Chicago,
where she died in 1905, at the age of forty-two. George also describes how
Cleary's career reflects the difficulties faced by women authors at the
end of the nineteenth century and the unique perspectives that such women
brought to the art of fiction. 
The Willa Cather Scholarly Edition